


paradigm shift, and also fish

by Ashling



Category: Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
Genre: /projects onto characters/ is this creativity?, /steals from book canon/ is this creativity?, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Angst, Crying, Drama & Romance, F/F, Gay Nick Young (Crazy Rich Asians), Gaysian, Hopeful Ending, Lesbian Rachel Chu, Non-Linear Narrative, Weddings, tfw you fall head over heels in love but you're a fully formed adult with a fully formed life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:46:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24933229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: It's only been about a week in Singapore, and already Rachel has begun to fray at the seams.
Relationships: Colin Khoo/Araminta Lee/Nick Young, Rachel Chu & Nick Young, Rachel Chu/Astrid Leong
Comments: 20
Kudos: 36
Collections: Fandom For Australia





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Prinzenhasserin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prinzenhasserin/gifts).



> Thank you, Prinzenhasserin! You're the best. <3

Discreetly, almost politely, taking her time, allowing Rachel many hours between the flicker of a white blouse on a tall woman and the aromatic fruitiness of shaved ice, but relentlessly, endlessly, turning up even in the most unexpected place (a turn of phrase in a mass email from the head of the NYU econ department), in complete silence and without showing even a hint of herself to anybody else, Astrid haunted Rachel through Singapore until Rachel gave up. Rachel had expected it, but she hadn’t expected it to be this uncomfortable. Alive though Astrid was, and completely unconcerned with Rachel as she probably was, Rachel could not help but feel Astrid’s presence since the moment she got off the plane, tantalizing, as if Astrid was a sound of footsteps forever around the next corner. Singapore was stretching Rachel thin, slow but sure, and eventually she snapped.

It was the last party before the wedding, which meant that by now Rachel had long ceased to harvest any amusement from the condescension, petty jealousy, and self-importance of the Singapore elite. Nick was talking to his grandmother, Peik Lin wasn’t at the party, and Oliver was in China for the day to hunt down some information about an upcoming auction piece. Even her ultimate party fallback, food, had deserted her. She’d had a stomachache all afternoon. And when she saw Eleanor Young hovering over the cooks in the kitchen, pointing an imperial finger whenever she saw the smallest detail gone awry, that drained the fun from even looking at the stuff.

All this is to say that Rachel had not forgotten her promise to Nick—no Astrid until at least after the wedding, because he needed all the undivided emotional support he could get—but when she saw Astrid across the room, by herself, thanking the bartender with a smile that could warm the North Pole—well, nothing else seemed to matter any more. You can’t blame a woman for running towards an oasis in a desert, even if it’s only a mirage.

And oh, the way Astrid smiled at her! When Rachel leaned on the bar beside her, it was the first time in public since the plane touched down in Singapore that Rachel no longer felt even a little self-conscious about her own facial expression and body language. Astrid had a way of making it safe and even easy to exist, even here. Her presence bent gravity.

“Hello, Rachel,” she said. “Enjoying the party?” Her voice imbued these pedestrian words with not only elegance, but a hint of archness. She had to know.

“It’s a bacchanalia of bullshit, but far be it from me to complain about free food,” said Rachel, and was rewarded by a different smile, this one flavored wry. “What about you?” 

“Happy to see you again. I was beginning to think I wouldn’t be able to talk to you until the wedding.” Astrid’s eyes were all pleasantry, but there was a lilt of a question in her voice.

Blame it on the jet lag or something. Rachel didn’t want to brush it off and she didn’t want to lie. “That was almost the case.” And then—it wasn’t a non sequitur—”What do you think are my chances of finally meeting the famous Michael Teo?”

“My husband?” Astrid said to her glass.

It had been almost a full year, but Rachel could still recognize a glint of Astrid’s wounded dignity when she saw it. What a strange thing to be drawn by, and yet that had been it, for Rachel, long ago. 

  
  
  
  


Rachel should’ve known that the knocking at the door was not their landlord. It was a polite three raps, and the man always hammered away like he had a search warrant, but in her defense, Rachel hadn’t had a solid chunk of sleep exceeding four hours in the past week. 

Neither had Nick. So they both stared at each other, amidst a tumble of boxes, clearly not packed to go and clearly not having vacated the premises, going _shitshitshitshitshit_ at each other like a pair of kids until finally Rachel pulled herself together and whisper-hissed, “You go.”

“What? Me?” Nick looked aghast. 

“He likes you better.”

“No he doesn’t!”

“He hates you less. It’s almost the same thing.” Rachel gave Nick a Look, which reminded him that, at the end of the day, he had to live with her for the rest of his life and that the landlord, on the other hand, was a temporary enemy. She could tell the exact moment when he realized this, perhaps because that was also the same moment he rolled his eyes.

“You can scapegoat me if you want!” she whispered after him, huddling up behind the sofa.

“I’m gonna,” he said, and the the door opened. “Hello there, we were just—”

“Nicky?” Whoever that was, it was definitely not their landlord. Probably a woman.

NIck’s voice changed entirely, like someone had wiped the sunshine right off it. “What happened?”

“It’s been a long week, and many things have happened.” The voice was elegant, accented, even, and just a little bit wobbly. “But if I had to choose an event to highlight, I believe the most significant one was a conversation with Michael in which he confirmed that he is fucking other women—plural—and that he has no desire to get a divorce. As if the two are compatible. Which, in fact—” And here the voice got even wobblier. “They are not.”

“Fuck,” Nick said, deeply heartfelt, while at the exact same moment, Rachel was mouthing _Fuck_ , to herself. “Come in, come in.”

There was a sound of heels on tile, and a some sniffling. 

“It’s all right, let it out,” said Nick, which had to mean that they were hugging, right? And if they were hugging, then maybe Rachel could just sneak away to the—

Nope. Oh, she absolutely could not. And even peeking around the side of the sofa had been a mistake, because now the woman was looking her right in the eyes. 

There were a number of things that Rachel instantly knew. She knew that the woman’s name was Astrid Leong, and that she was Nick’s favorite cousin, and that they had seen each other on FaceTime. She knew that the dress Astrid had on, an elegant turquoise play on a cheongsam, probably cost more than a year’s worth of Rachel’s rent. She knew that she could count on her fingers the number of women she’d known who could come close to being beautiful as Astrid, and even with dripping mascara, Astrid beat them all to pieces for sheer queenliness. And then came the thing that struck her hardest of all: she recognized the look in Astrid’s eyes. 

There was a flash of terrible wounded dignity before Astrid whipped down the cover of her pride. The swift way she extricated herself from Nick’s arms, the tilt of her chin: these things lay claim to Rachel. She found herself startled by how visceral it was. Astrid could have had any other name, worn any other dress, been ugly or beautiful enough to blind, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Like recognized like. It was the first lesson Rachel had learned from her mother, a lesson repeated over decades: keep your clothes clean and neat, sit up straight, and never let them see you flinch. Nobody needs to know how badly you’re struggling except for you. And in fact, even in the privacy of your own home, it would be best if you still pretended not to notice that you were struggling at all.

Rachel had fallen in love women women before, vividly and memorably. She’d fallen in love with women when she saw their joy, their ferocity, their kindness, qualities that Rachel admired and coveted. Astrid was the first that had left marks outlasting a year of absence, and Rachel had fallen in love with her for her pride.

Best not to examine _that_ too closely.

  
  
  
  


When Rachel called to confess, she was curled up in an armchair and the room still smelled of bloody fish. The maids had done what they could to clean it up, admirably blank-faced the whole time, but Rachel had drawn the line at sickly-sweet floral air freshener. And the windows only tilted open a little bit, at a stylish angle, which made for terrible air circulation. Why had they designed it like that, Rachel wondered as the phone rang on and on. Araminta’s mother was many things, and thoughtless wasn’t one of them. Maybe they didn’t want guests throwing things from the upper windows onto other guests on the beach below. Maybe they didn’t want guests throwing themselves from the upper windows onto the beach below. Though of course who would want to do such a thing in such a veritable paradise?

Rachel wasn’t crying, she was just exhausted. And the world wasn’t as it should be. She thought she had grown accustomed to loneliness, but it turned out she had only accustomed to being romantically single. At nine at night, with bonfires going outside and all the other girls partying, this was the sort of thing she was used to, but Nick should be there with her and her laptop, Nick should be doing a plank for vanity’s sake and watching something off the Criterion Collection like the snob he wasn’t. 

Before the spa visit and Amanda’s inexpert digs (but after Araminta had mentioned that Astrid couldn’t make it), Rachel had had to take part in romantic storytelling, each girl tipsy and waxing wise about married life, if she was married, showing off the depths of her husband’s devotion. Or, if the girl was unmarried, hinting at sexcapades to show that she didn’t mind it. Rachel had only wanted to not rock the boat, so she talked about how Nick was always sharing his food with her, which wasn’t strictly untrue so much as it was a polishing up of the way she constantly stole his food. Which she thought was pretty cute. But the girls had pooh-poohed her for being boring and not talking about her feelings, so Araminta had come to Rachel’s rescue, so Rachel had felt even worse. 

There were stories she could tell. She could blow the roof off a production of Romeo & Juliet with the stories she could tell, and some of them were even her own. But Araminta felt like the only real thing within miles—Rachel felt like if she said _Boo!_ the girls would dissolve into the white sand—and that was no company to tell truths to. The enmity of the bloody fish had given her a nice vicious edge for about half an hour, but the victory was hollow since she didn’t care about the enemy, and would Nick pick up his phone already? Just how wild was this bachelor party? Maybe he had told Colin everything. Maybe her ringing phone was interrupting them, and she should hang up.

“Rachel? Is everything okay?” There was no background noise whatsoever: instant mystery.

“Uh, yeah.” Rachel resisted the decades-old urge to chew her fingernails. “What about you? Did Bernard Tai set you guys up in a sensory deprivation tank, or like a graveyard? I was expecting to at least Cardi B in the background for the strippers.”

Nick made chuckling noises. He sounded uneasy. “I wouldn’t know. My mother thought it would be better if I stayed at home instead of going on the bachelor party. I’ve been away for so long, she has a lot of family business she needs me to look at. Papers and things.”

Bullshit. Rachel and Nick had been in Singapore for a week and Eleanor hadn’t mentioned needing his help with business once; it was a flimsy excuse to get him away from the bachelor party. Fury bubbled up in Rachel. What galled her the most about Eleanor Young wasn’t the desire for control or the concern with propriety or even the obsession with class; it was the fact that she couldn’t see Nick properly even when he was right in front of her. As miserable as it made Rachel that Astrid did not love her husband, it made Nick equally miserable that Colin loved his fiancée. Colin was happy. 

Nick had had the moral clarity to realize that his own life had been rotten to the core and the humility to realize that he couldn’t change the entire island, he could only leave it. This more than anything else, more than their shared taste in desserts or shared languages or shared desire to live quietly prosperous, half-closeted lives, was what had made Rachel move in with him. The simplicity in his selflessness and the deep resolve behind it were the things that made him a prince among men. Not the name, certainly not the money. If Eleanor really thought that he was selfish enough to ruin his best friend’s happiness, not to mention Araminta’s, then she was missing out on her own son. Rachel wanted to tell her that.

Rachel could have told her that, too, because the way Nick was talking, she was sure that Eleanor was there in the room with him. But she found she was tired, and there had been drama enough that day. 

“It’s probably for the best,” she said. “You don’t do well with hangovers.”

“Hey,” Nick protested, “I’m not such a lightweight anymore.”

“Yes, you are,” Rachel said fondly. “When the morning sun hits you, it’s like you’re vampire dying.” 

He was laughing. “That’s just not true!” Behind him, a voice, and he sobered up. “I should be getting back. Did you need something?”

“No,” said Rachel, and she was struck by how sad she was that it was over already. “No, just calling to say goodnight.” God, her emotions were all over the place. Singapore was doing things to her.

“Goodnight, then,” said Nick. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” said Rachel, and then she hung up. 

  
  
  
  


In another world, once just slightly different, Eleanor would not have been in the room and Rachel would have told Nick the story that she had wanted to tell Araminta. What little wisdom she’d gotten from falling in love. There was agony and fidelity and all that big stuff, but there was something incredibly silly and stupid about it too, the way it rendered people childlike when they didn’t need their adult pretensions and defenses anymore. Astrid had a penchant for disco, it had turned out, much later, when Nick had flown out to a medieval studies conference and the whole apartment was empty save for boxes piled round the edges of the room. Astrid had a penchant for disco and dancing like it was a sixties and laughing with her mouth wide open, and when you got her laughing and dancing hard enough, something miraculous happened: she stopped being angelically graceful. It was a true discovery. Anyone else might think that elegance was bred into Astrid, along with the long limbs, but no. When she danced to Get Down Tonight, her height turned into a sort of gangliness and Rachel could see straight through the decades all the way down to a teenage Astrid, an Astrid who might have braces and who was too young to know how to look good from every angle. 

Rachel could have told Araminta about this, with the names stripped. She could have told Nick about this, with the names intact. You think this is it, for the rest of your life, teaching kids how to use STATA and paying data bills and biting back rude things and sitting with your knees together on the subway, and then you meet someone you can be truly, genuinely, geeky-disco-dancing stupid with. And you never want to let that go.

But you do, of course you do. 

Rachel could’ve told Nick this, in another world, and she knew Nick would’ve understood. She wouldn’t have led with that story, though. She probably would confess to him about talking to Astrid at the party first, and he’d forgive her first and quiz her on the details later, because that was the kind of guy Nick was. He’d agree with her that Michael wasn’t half as good-looking as everyone made him out to be, and she’d reassure him that there hadn’t been any drama—which was almost true, there hadn’t been any visible drama—and they’d both reaffirm that she should avoid Astrid at the wedding because they couldn’t both be emotional wrecks at the same time. 

In another world, Rachel wouldn't want to end the conversation on a sad note, so she’d probably finish up with a comic retelling of the fish. CATCH THIS YOU GOLD DIGGING BITCH had been written in lipstick, not blood, and she would have made a lot of fun about that, the cowardice it entailed—probably the girl or girls who had left her that present hadn’t even carried the fish themselves, just browbeaten a maid into doing it. And then, of course, the big scene, Rachel and the fish and a fillet knife she requested from the cook, marching into the spa area, slamming down the fish onto an empty wooden slab, butchering it so expertly that the old cook who had taught her would have grunted at her in approval for it. It had been yellowtail, from the kitchen. Far be it from any of those girls to catch their own fish. And from the looks on their faces, Rachel was pretty sure that the effort had been spearheaded by Amanda, so Rachel had offered Amanda sashimi, and Amanda declined. Despite everything, Rachel did on occasion have a real flair for drama. Rachel and Nick could’ve had a real laugh over _that._

In no world would Rachel have told Nick or anyone else about the dance that she thought about as she fell asleep in the armchair, phone still in hand. Disco had worn both Rachel and Astrid out, although Astrid had more endurance than Rachel had expected, and somehow Astrid had offered to teach Rachel to waltz. Rachel already knew how to waltz, but she didn’t say that. So, for the first time in her life, she let herself be led and didn’t resent it. Astrid’s hand on her shoulder blade had been firm but gentle. Astrid’s playlist of waltzes had melted slowly from the grandeur of Viennese orchestras to softer melodies on the piano, and eventually there was singing, too, and Rachel’s heartbeat was going faster even as her feet kept an even pace. The constant circular pattern that they were making across the floor had Rachel entranced, strangely calm even when she could feel her palms sweating, and when she dared to glance up at Astrid, she found Astrid looking at her with such unbreakable fondness that she could stop dancing, and knew it was okay. She could touch Astrid’s arm, and know it was okay. She could lean in.

Rachel’s phone slipped out of her hand, and she began to dream about another time when she wanted what she wanted and it would be okay, and Astrid was there too, still tasting of cherry lip gloss.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The status quo crumbles.

There was no greater demon than the one that descended on Rachel every time she tried to text Astrid, and now was no exception; she lay on the beautiful antique bed, which was probably older than many democracies, and rolled about on it like a toddler stung by a bee, bottom lip between both teeth, words darting by out of the corner of her eye like so many silver fish and she empty-handed. Nick found her that way, and even though she was aware of him leaning against the wall and brushing his teeth, she ignored him for a couple of minutes until he went back to the bathroom to spit. As soon as he was out of sight, she yelled after him. 

“‘Hey Astrid, Colin and Araminta just took Nick and I to try some local food, and the ice kacang made me think of you. Every bit as good as you said it was.’ Yellow heart emoji, blushing smiling emoji. Too many emojis? Should I go emoji-less for Astrid communications? What do you think?”

Nick emerged, fresh-faced and in his pajamas, a serious look on his face. “Rach.”

“What?” 

“We’ve been over this like a hundred times. You can either do it, or let it go. But we can’t do this whole kinda-sorta thing again.”

Rachel cut her eyes at him. “We?”

He raised his hands, palms-up. “Arguably, this is starting to feel very similar to the Marianne episode, and who got pulled into it to the tune of almost losing his laptop? This guy. That’s not to mention you making me do a fake Irish accent when she—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Rachel flopped onto her back and threw her phone onto the side table, text unsent. 

“I’m just saying.”

Nick climbed into bed next to her and turned off the light. They had a lot of their conversations this way, sleepy and side by side, and Rachel found the ritual of it comforting even if the conversation was anything but. 

“You know this is nothing like Marianne,” she said to the ceiling she couldn’t see.

“I know,” Nick said quietly, and Rachel took a second to be profoundly grateful for him, for the fact that she could (just barely) stand it when his voice was compassionate, in a way she couldn’t take from almost anybody else. “But,” he added, “it’s still all or nothing. That still stands. You know half-assing it doesn’t work at all.”

“You’re like my mother.” Repeating the truths that Rachel already knew, the truths that Rachel could only hear coming from other people.

“If that’s even half-true, I’m very flattered.”

Neither of them said good-night, which meant that certain thoughts were allowed to marinate in silence until they were ready. Sometimes they were insightful, sometimes they were beautiful, sometimes shameful or mundane or absurd, but tonight all Rachel had was sadness. She’d spent all day in a riot of laughing and dodging through crowds and stuffing herself and always, always talking, so this was all she had left. 

“I miss her,” she said.

Nick could have said,  _ you only saw her for less than two weeks,  _ but if he was the kind of guy to say that kind of thing, he wouldn’t be Nick. So she knew he would say, “I know,” and she knew she would let him. And he did, and she pressed up against him, arm to arm, a little warmth in the dark.

After a while, she asked, “Do you miss him?” 

Nick could have said,  _ ten years is a long time,  _ but if she was the kind of woman who he could lie to, she wouldn’t be Rachel, so he thought on his answer. Finally he said, “When I went into his bag to get sunscreen, I found Zoloft. And I didn’t...”

The Young family estate was situated in an island of pure city, five million people packed into less than three hundred square miles. And yet, in a bedroom at night, not even terribly late at night, there was complete silence. Not even crickets from the window.

“When we were younger,” Nick said, “I used to tell Colin he should try and talk to somebody about the panic attacks. And he wouldn’t. He was always afraid his father would find out. I used to tell him that he could put my name down, I would pay for it, we could pretend that I was the one going to counseling, my father spent the whole year fishing in Australia and I was too much of a golden boy to suffer my mother’s disapproval. But he just wouldn’t. And I used to talk to him, like, pretending to smoke outside of a club or something and it would be exactly the same as when we were four feet tall in uniforms and he thought he’d just failed a midterm. He could barely breathe. For years, I begged him to get help, and he wouldn’t. Now he’s got Araminta, and he’s got a prescription.”

“He could have just bought it off the black market, the way rich people do, no prescription involved,” said Rachel, though she was aware this wasn’t exactly comfort. “Probably in preparation for the wedding.”

“There were tampons in the bag. Their lives are all mixed up together. She knows.”

Rachel was losing track of what was up and what was down, though she was sure she was on Nick’s side, whatever side that was. “It’s probably for the best that she knows, isn’t it?” she ventured.

“Yeah,” said Nick. “Yeah, it is.”

Secretly, Rachel thought Araminta might know about more than Colin’s anxiety. So many times, Araminta had put her arm round Rachel’s shoulders and said something about  _ us girls,  _ or suggested that they have a night out sometime, or hoped they could have a quieter talk during Araminta’s bachelorette party. At first, Rachel had thought that maybe this was some kind of bizarre double lavender wedding situation and Araminta was coming on to her, but there wasn’t anything sexual in it, and at last, thanks to a bit of strange phrasing and a look, Rachel figured it out: Araminta wanted to get Rachel alone to talk to her about Colin and Nick. Like hell was Rachel going to play that game. She didn’t know Araminta and she didn’t know what she wanted, which meant that she didn’t know how to protect Nick, which meant she had to assiduously avoid one-on-ones with Araminta. The question was whether she was overthinking this or not, and what she should do about it. Before she could make up her mind either way, Nick spoke. 

“He’s happy,” said Nick. “That’s the only answer to your question. It doesn’t matter if I miss him or not any more. It’s all or nothing. I was in, and he wasn’t. You were in, and Astrid wasn’t. The only thing we get to decide is how badly we take it.”

He made Rachel’s half sound far too simple. He was missing out on almost all the relevant details. But she thought from the way Nick said it that he found some comfort in the symmetry he saw, so she just let it pass. Letting things pass was more or less the central tenet of their modus operandi, and they were still together, weren’t they?

  
  
  
  


It took a long time for Rachel to get out of the scrum of the wedding guests. Many of them lingered, wanting to talk to her, perhaps because of her Cinderella-blue makeover and perhaps because of her coup with Princess Intan, and she was desperate to get away. She had already had her cry, in public, set to a beautiful song and accompanied by scores of other people crying too; weddings were good that way, because everybody was expected to be emotional. Rachel knew she was happy, truly, for all the happiness other people would get out of it. But she also knew that whatever future she could shape for herself from here on out would be duller, colder, emptier than what she had been able to look forward to just a few hours before.

Nick would meet her at the reception, but the car wasn’t any privacy. The car had a driver, and drivers talked. Servants talked. The constant need to be in public, even in your own car or your own home, maybe your own bedroom, made Rachel understand the neuroticism of the ultra-rich a little better. Servants talked. Rachel was sick of it all. But even in the women’s bathroom, there would be ears.

Academia was good training for this. Rachel knew how to swallow it all back down, and how to blow her nose unobtrusively, and how to stop herself from crying for as long as she could, even as her eyes began to brim. But no amount of inner steel could stop the tears from overflowing at a certain point, and so she was forced to resort to a linen closet—not her finest hour. And she was not alone there, either. 

It was a small space, with shelves of tablecloths making it even smaller, so that Rachel barely had room to stand next to Astrid. That close, she had to look up to see Astrid’s face, but Astrid was covering her face with her hands like a child and crying like her heart would break. For a second, Rachel could only stare, and then she closed the door behind her and put her arms around Astrid, her own tears forgotten. 

Rachel didn’t speak for a long time. She’d never seen Astrid so abandoned to her emotion—not grief—and it frightened her. She didn’t want to know what could break Astrid down so completely, what made Astrid’s head go down on Rachel’s shoulder at once. She didn’t want to know why Astrid’s fingers were digging into Rachel’s back so hard, because if Astrid couldn’t bear something, Rachel probably couldn’t either. But at last the suspense was too much.

“Is it Cassian?” she said quietly, half-hoping Astrid didn’t hear.

“Oh,” said Astrid, a small sound, realization. Her fingers loosened, her sobs relented, and then she straightened. There was a dazed look on her face, and she wiped at her red eyes with the base of her thumb. “No. God no, he’s fine. It’s all fine. He’s. He’s staying over with some of his cousins this week.” Her breathing still hitched a little, too fast. 

To prevent herself from asking  _ then what?  _ Rachel rummaged around inside her purse. “I have Kleenex.” Except she didn’t. She had several napkins from the Wendy’s in the basement of the student union, which would have to do.

Astrid blew her nose—how did she learn to be discreet even in blowing her nose?—and then said, in a steadier voice, “Thank you.”

They were standing quite close together still, but not touching. Rachel missed it. She wouldn’t even ask for much, just to put a reassuring hand on Astrid’s arm, maybe rub her back. It was the only time she regretted having kissed Astrid, because that was a thing she couldn’t take back, and she was terrified that anything she did now, however friendly, would come off as a come-on at the worst time in the world.

“I like your dress,” she said, awkwardly. With Astrid in heels, the her collar was directly at Rachel’s eye level, and it was embroidered with peacock feathers in beautiful gold, blue, and green detail. As long as she was staring at it and thinking about how many hours of embroidery it must have taken, she could avoid the urge to offer to do something for Astrid, like an idiot knight sans sword or horse. Her neck was still a little wet from Astrid’s tears, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“Thank you,” said Astrid, again. And then, with a note of bitterness in her voice that Rachel hadn’t heard there before, she added, “My life as I knew it is over, that’s all.”

When Rachel looked up, she saw that Astrid was smiling, a small smile with no warmth in it, like she was laughing at herself. 

“Funny, mine too,” said Rachel. She could see the question forming in Astrid’s eyes, and she knew that Astrid wouldn’t ask either, unless Rachel offered. God, but Rachel loved her.

“You know what?” Rachel found herself saying. “We should just leave. We should go get a cab, and go down to the market, and eat our body weight twice over in dumplings and ice kacang.” She sounded like someone else, saying it, and her heart was pounding fast like she would have to run soon.

“I can’t,” said Astrid, “I’m sorry.” She touched Rachel’s cheek. It was only consolation, but Rachel was more than happy to take it. “I want to, but if I don’t show up tonight, not even Ah Ma can cover for me. And they’ve all spent so much time predicting my downfall, I want to delay their satisfaction for as long as I can.”

Rachel had gone through many things on spite alone, so she understood the feeling on a visceral level. But she didn’t quite understand the reason behind it. Whatever had happened, she’d been too wrapped up in her own problems to notice it. “Your downfall?” she ventured. “That sounds dramatic.”

“Colin and I had a conversation in the car on the way here, and he decided not to come to the wedding, so Ah Ma had to come with me. Needless to say,” Astrid said levelly, “I think I’m having a divorce.” Again, that small, poisoned smile.

“I’m sorry,” said Rachel, and she truly was. Not for the sake of the man, who she’d happily dropkick off a cliff, but for the publicity and the family and the lawyers and most of all, how much it might hurt Cassian. She had never forgotten what Astrid had said about him before she left New York City for good.

  
  
  
  


“One thing,” Astrid said. She was sitting on the same sofa that Rachel had once tried to hide behind, in Nick and Rachel’s new apartment, her hands tightly clasped, her right thumb moving over the knuckles of her left hand compulsively. “He’s my son, I have to do this one thing right. Everything else—” She lifted her shoulders helplessly. “Not that I tried, much, but with him it has to be different.” She looked like was trying to fold in on herself. “I used to tell myself that. ‘At least—’ But now I’m halfway around the world, and he’s—” 

Now Astrid was looking at Rachel. Hunched as she was, and sitting as they both were, Rachel only had to look up a little to look her in the eyes. “I can’t be halfway around the world from him,” Astrid said, “and I can’t be doing as his father does. He has to have one parent, at least, with no skeletons in the closet. Or as few as possible.”

At first, Rachel had let Astrid talk, thinking that perhaps if she could struggle her way through an explanation, it would help her, but at this last silence, Astrid looking at Rachel like she needed help, expected help, Rachel kissed her cheek. She didn’t even mind being classified as a skeleton in a closet, really. Some days it felt close enough to true.

“I know,” Rachel said, and this was nearly true. She didn’t have a son or a reputation, but she did have a mother and a job. She knew what hospital calls were like, and what it was to feel besieged. In a fire, you had to know what to grab before you ran out the door. Packing light for the end of the world, you had to choose carefully.

“Thank you,” said Astrid to her own white knuckles. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” lied Rachel. She was rubbing long slow circles into Astrid’s back, which she knew was probably not right now that they had—broken up, as thoroughly as two people not dating could break up. But it wasn’t a switch flipped. 

“In a minute,” Rachel went on, “I’ll go schedule you a plane ticket. Just remember, Oliver says that Cassian wasn’t badly hurt, and Oliver’s not the kind of guy to lie to you about this, right?”

“Right.” Astrid leaned into Rachel, and Rachel cupped the back of her head with one hand and held her there. Astrid’s hair was silky. She balled up Rachel’s shirt in both fists.

Outside, the New York skyline was going black against a blaze of sunset, and Rachel thought, in a moment of odd distance from herself, that she had not expected this to be their last day. She would have done things differently, she would have gotten out of bed sooner. She would have done everything differently.

  
  
  
  


With half her mind warring with the other half, trying to move her head so she could stare behind herself at the gorgeous assembly and pick out Astrid’s head from the wedding crowd, Rachel found it quite easy, after all, to talk to Princess Intan. Ultra-rich people who dabbled in microeconomics for their pet charities were a breed that Rachel had met before, and ultimately it required very little effort on her part to drop a few buzzwords about microloans. The real effort was keeping a smile on her face, and remembering that quite soon, she would have to focus on Nick, who deserved a shoulder to lean on, and Araminta, who Rachel still needed to avoid at all costs.

So split was her attention that it took several tries, and a gesture from Princess Intan, before Rachel noticed the attendant at the end of the aisle trying to get her attention. She was young and intricately looped with lace and surprisingly blunt. “Araminta needs you,” she said.

“I think you must be looking for somebody else,” said Rachel. “I’m not a bridesmaid. I only met her last week.”

“You’re Rachel Chu?”

Rachel had a sinking feeling about this. Right before the ceremony? Calling her to come in public, too, where Rachel couldn’t refuse. It was a smart move, she had to hand it to Araminta; the right of the bride to pretty much any woman’s emotional support was something that transcended oceans. 

“Yes,” she said, and gathered her skirts to go.

Princess Intan gave her an encouraging smile. “Do your best,” she said, and then, thinking herself funny, “We don’t want another Lacie Huang situation on our hands!”

_ Maybe we do, _ Rachel thought dourly as she followed the attendant back down the aisle, feeling hundreds of hungry eyes fastened on her.  _ Maybe we do. _

The bride’s dressing room was huge—probably a converted conference room or bible study room—and painted emerald. When Araminta turned and dismissed everyone (bridesmaids, hairdresser, tailor, attendants) from the room, Rachel could hear in her voice that all Araminta’s natural energy was being intentionally directed, like a high-pressured spring of water, down a specific and narrow channel. There was nothing playful to her anymore. That look would have knocked a lesser woman back two steps, and it wasn’t even adversarial.

“I’ve tried to be polite and I’ve tried to become friends with you,” said Araminta, “but time’s running out and I’ve been so run off my feet by this wedding I haven’t been able to catch you, so let’s just get this done, shall we?” 

“Alternatively, I could leave and you could get married, as planned,” said Rachel crisply.

“That part will happen later. For now, please sit down.” Araminta gestured at an empty chair opposite her, and then, when Rachel didn’t move, Araminta stood up. Against the swathe of emerald, Araminta’s white and gold dress made her look like some kind of sculptural, rare flower, possibly a poisonous one.

“I hope you actually are a lesbian,” she said.

Rachel already had her best poker face on. “I’m not up for marriage, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“The evidence is pretty good, I’d say. You did make a dating profile to that effect, albeit under the name Jessica, before you met Nick; you have given substantially to LGBT organizations, you follow a few gay news organizations on Facebook, and samples of your writing in college line up perfectly with some anonymous pieces in the feminist lesiban zines of that time.”

Many a stress nightmare Rachel had had of a beautiful, straight, powerful, socially well-connected woman who could severely wreck her life finding out that Rachel was a lesbian. Usually, that woman was somebody that Rachel was in love with—or Cate Blanchett. But, no, this was real, the kind of real that felt like a fever, but real nonetheless. 

“Why are you saying all this?” Rachel said.

“I just want it on the record, in case you’re not a lesbian, that I did my best to make the best choice that I could,” said Araminta. 

“Why does it matter?”

“If I’m wrong, and you’re in love with Nick, then this is going to hurt. But I want you to know,” said Araminta, her dark eyes taking on even greater intensity, “that I tried my best to make sure that wasn’t the case. And even if it is, this is Colin and Colin’s future. When it comes down to it, I’ll choose his happiness over anyone else’s, every time.”

“Maybe you two should get married.” Yes, Rachel was utterly lost, and she knew that snark wouldn’t help her, and she didn’t even know why she needed help. But when it came down to it, she’d choose Nick’s happiness every time too, and to Nick, being outed in Singapore would be a catastrophe and worse than a catastrophe. After a catastrophe, you rebuild. After a nuclear bomb, what’s the point? And this smelled like that danger.

Araminta studied Rachel for a minute, and then her shoulders relaxed a little. She would not be a very good poker player; Rachel could read her relief from a mile away. 

“You’re trying to protect Nick from me?” she said. “We’re on the same side. Colin told me everything.”

The traitor. “Then what do you need me for?”

“He’s never gotten over it,” said Araminta. “He still feels ashamed.”

“We don’t get over it,” said Rachel, and God after everything, this could still get to her. Araminta shouldn’t be able to have this effect—nobody should—and yet Rachel could feel this in every part of her body, the sweat and the rage. “And shame? Look at this place.” She gestured. She didn’t know whether the gold leaf on the ceiling was real or fake, and that was the point. “What the  _ fuck _ did you expect?”

“I don’t—” Araminta recalibrated. “Colin’s ashamed because he didn’t run with Nick when Nick ran, the last time. When he got away for good. And I think he’s convinced himself that he doesn’t deserve to be happy. We have everything, and he still—” Whatever came next, Araminta couldn’t let an outsider know, but it throbbed in her eyes. “He’s grown so much, but he still thinks of himself as that twenty-year old. As a coward.”

“He is a coward.” Rachel heard herself say it, and was surprised by its viciousness. Many a time she had thought to herself, privately, when Nick was busy cooking or texting or crying and couldn’t read it on her, that Nick should have given Colin up long ago, as well as anyone could when there was not even texting conversations to give up. Many a time she’d thought that maybe Nick had hyped up this boarding-school thing too much, over the years, romanticized it maybe because of youth and nostalgia and yet Rachel found herself so angry about it now. Angry at all of them, and the gold ceiling, and herself most of all. Coward.

“You don’t know him,” said Araminta, and some small part of Rachel, the part that was always ready to find the nearest exit, noted that Araminta’s anger when it finally came, came cold as ice. “He was young then, and it’s—you don’t know what it’s like here. He’s different now.”

If Rachel let  _ you don’t know what it’s like here _ rattle around in her head for even a millisecond, she was going to combust. “What do you want?” she said, instead.

Araminta clasped her hands, like she was preparing to sing in a choir. “I want to know if there’s a chance, not for some happily ever after resolution—”

“That would get in the way of your happily ever after, wouldn’t it,” said Rachel, who in the face of a wedding was turning out to be meaner than she’d been in decades.

“I’d be fine with them, if they could be happy. Or, I think Colin and I could work out a way to include him, but.” Araminta shook her head. “I know Nick’s probably still angry, and he has absolutely every right to be, but if they could talk about this honestly, I think that would help Colin a lot, and it probably wouldn’t hurt Nick either. All Nick does is pretend that things are okay, and that he’s happy for us, and I think that’s worse for Colin than if he actually said what was on his mind and had it out.”

“Are you kidding?” Dimly, as if through frosted glass, Rachel was beginning to make out the shape of a possibility. “I’ve spent the past eight years of my life with the man and he doesn’t have a grudge against anybody, probably doesn’t have any idea how to hold a grudge, and especially not against the love of his life.”

Araminta stared for a long moment, only to be interrupted by a timid attendant letting her know that it was ten minutes till go time.

“Are you sure?” said Araminta.

Rachel felt exhausted, but no longer angry. “Completely sure.”

“But what about…” The possibilities were beginning to flash across Araminta’s face quick as squares of light through the windows of a passing train. For a brief moment, Rachel thought about biting her tongue and just leaving; if Araminta wasn’t smart enough to grab hold of what was in front of her while she could, then she didn’t deserve it. But the bitterness and spite in that shocked Rachel back into herself. For fuck’s sake. This wasn’t a soap opera, these were people she liked. And Nick, who she loved.

“You said you thought you and Colin could work out a way to include him, so go work it out,” said Rachel.

“It sounds so simple, when you say it like that,” said Araminta dryly.

“It is simple.” Increasingly, Rahcel was coming to believe that everything important was simple, at the heart of it, and that complexities were what people clung to so that they wouldn’t have to face the truths of what they’d done—or hadn’t done.

Araminta, at least, did not seem to share this flaw. “In that case,” she said, “you’d better go away, so I can make some propositions to your boyfriend.”

“By all means,” said Rachel, and after a smile—they were both surprised to find that they were, after all, on the same side—she walked out and let the door close behind her.

  
  
  
  


Rachel was sprawled out on the bed, watching a student documentary with a dull look in her eyes and nothing written on the rubric; next to her, Nick was chewing the end of his pen to pieces over revisions. When Rachel’s phone went  _ ding,  _ they both sprang up like they were electrocuted.

“Well?” Nick demanded. 

Rachel’s face gave nothing away. “Cassian has a fractured wrist and a concussion, but otherwise, he’s fine.” 

Nick smiled encouragingly, like she was one of his humane society foster dogs and she had finally learned how to pee outside. “That’s good, right?”

“It would’ve been better without the fracture and the concussion, I assume.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you should go bring him a teddy bear,” said Nick, and then, seeing the expression on Rachel’s face, he added, “Or a bunch of Legos, or, like, a Nintendo DS.”

“You know nothing about children,” said Rachel, making no effort to lessen the edge that was sharpening in her voice.

Nick, damn him, remained unfazed. “Neither do you, but it doesn’t hurt to make an effort.”

Rachel began typing. “I’m not going to go halfway around the world to see a kid I’ve never met before. Can you imagine how much it would freak him out?”

“It might be nice for his mother,” said Nick.

Pausing mid-word, Rachel lifted her chin to give him a stare.

He grinned, giving it more goofiness than he had any right to. “I’m not easily cowed, you know.” 

“This isn’t one of your movies, Nick. I’m not getting on a plane for a woman I met two weeks ago.”

“Why not?” Nick demanded. 

“It’s in the—I just said. I met her two weeks ago.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“Chew your pen and leave me alone, please.”

“Rach,” said Nick, this time without the goofiness and without trying to be endearing. Honest. “If it’s about us, I don’t want to get in the way. I wouldn’t mind, I’d be happy. I want you to be happy. And think about it for a minute.”

Rachel  _ had _ thought about it for a minute. She’d thought about it for hours, that was the problem. She couldn’t think of anything else.

“If you go to her,” Nick went on, “do you have any idea what that would mean to her? I mean, everybody falls all over themselves to do things for her or to give her things, but only because they want things back from her. I’ve seen it my whole life. They don’t love her, they love the idea of her. And Michael was the only thing she ever worked hard at—he didn’t want to get married, at first, and she nearly had to fight our Ah Ma in single combat over it—so you gotta understand, she’s never been sought out by anybody whose opinion mattered. You can’t deny there’s something here. I swear if you just fought for her, just a little bit, you could have her.” 

Rachel’s palms were sweating, and for a second she couldn’t look up at Nick. He knew her too well, and that was the problem. But then she realized: she knew him too well, too, and she knew how to burn him badly enough that he wouldn’t speak to her about this again for years, so she grit her teeth, glared, and did it.

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to be you or Colin in this story,” Rachel said, “But leave me the fuck out of it.”

Nick slept on the sofa for a few nights after that.

  
  
  
  


Everyone cried at the wedding, but Rachel was at first too absorbed in trying to catch Nick’s eye to feel anything, even hope, or dread. The pins fastening her headband were beginning to make her itch, and the music was far louder than what she was used to, and then—there was Nick, coming onto the platform at the front of the church, beaming from ear to ear and then Rachel started crying, because he was. 

This was Nick as he was at home, as he always ought to be, so big-hearted and overflowing with emotion that it made everyone around him feel it too. He looked so happy there wasn’t even room for him to look surprised, as Colin did. Colin looked as though he’d just won the lottery a few hours ago and still couldn’t understand the wealth of opportunities that had just opened up in front of him. And then, down the aisle, came Araminta, glowing and self-possessed and so pleased with herself that she winked at Rachel when she passed her in the aisle. Rachel usually resented women who got everything they wanted in life, but damn, Araminta wore it well, bare feet and all. And how could she resent this? 

After Colin and Araminta kissed, as the audience erupted into hoots and applause and a shower of flower petals rained down from the ceiling, Rachel caught Colin reaching out and squeezing Nick’s hand, just once. It wasn’t a ring and it wasn’t violins and it wasn’t sweeping enough for even a middle school production of a bad Shakespeare adaptation, but it was a happy ending that Rachel could believe in. Quiet, and compromised, and heartfelt; and one that excluded her.


	3. Chapter 3

Rachel felt herself being dragged up from the depths of sleep and resisted hard, because wakefulness when it came, came with such a feeling of exhaustion that it was as if she had a hangover, even though she hadn’t drunk much the night before. 

She batted away at the hands, only to hear Nick saying, “Come on, Rach, we’ll be late.”

Cautiously, Rachel squinted up at him, to find that the dim light was not sunrise but rather the bedside lamp. And beside the lamp, the clock read 5am. 

“Are you kidding me?” she said, but she knew it wasn’t a joke, because Nick was already dressed, and he looked wide awake.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said.

“Surprises at 5am are fine for volleyball team hazing in your twenties, not family wedding drama in your thirties,” said Rachel, but she sat up. 

“I promise it’s good,” Nick said, and he had such a kid’s look in his eyes that Rachel groaned and peeled herself up out of bed.

The surprise, it turned out, was a long car ride down to a private dock, and then—

“I am not getting in that thing,” said Rachel. It looked like a device from a James Bond movie, a big glass ball with two seats inside and some kind of engine and rigging underneath. It did not look like something she should trust with her life.

“Oh, come on,” said Nick, already opening the hatch and climbing inside. “Live a little. Besides, how else are we going to get some actual privacy?”

“Privacy for what?” said Rachel.

Nick peeked up at her from inside the glass ball. “Imagine where you’d like to be if you could go anywhere without anybody knowing where you’d gone.”

Rachel got in the submarine. 

Way back in the early days of Nick and Rachel, before they were even roommates, Rachel had been feeling too lazy to make her own dinner and so had wandered over to Nick’s apartment to help herself to his dinner, and opened the door to find him FaceTiming with his cousin, an angelic, delicate-featured woman with the height and alluring, lilting voice of a warrior goddess. Rachel gave one little wave, and then mouthed _Is she single?_ to Nick, but they didn’t know each other well enough yet to read each other’s lips, so she went off to raid the steamer for xiao long bao, and it wasn’t until after she’d washed up and Nick hung up that she got the full story.

Fairytale princess, any man at her feet. Every man at her feet. Gracious and graceful, and she’d chosen a peasant, a tiger, a rogue, a man with nothing to offer but abs and a half-cocked startup and a crooked smile.

“Figures,” Rachel said, and Nick said, “Yeah, the good ones are always married.”

But she hadn’t meant that of course Astrid was straight and taken. She had meant, of course Astrid got to pick and choose who she wanted, and then keep him. In those early days she was always bitter about something, and in that moment she happened to be bitter about how easy it was, for Astrid. Even after Nick told her about how difficult it had been for Astrid to even get her parents to attend the wedding, it was only: of course. Of course. The core of being a princess is being an heiress, and what would Astrid know about fish guts?

Except, somehow, over time, with more waves at the screen, more dinners shared, more stories, less bitterness, Rachel came to think differently about Astrid’s fairytale ending. It was nice, Rachel decided, to see that Astrid’s life was a possibility for one woman, at least. To be both good and powerful, desired and in control, in love and able to overcome everything else in the way, and doubly respected for it. By the time Cassian was born, and Nick sent a big bundle of toys, Rachel had gotten to the point that she could sign the card too with real goodwill. Somebody should get to win at this. Even if it wasn’t her, she was glad it was Astrid. Astrid seemed like she deserved it. ****

In the church bathroom, it was very quiet. All the guests had gone, and now only workers remained, taking down all the decorations, and so a kind of stillness prevailed, with rustling and voices down the hall. Rachel had jammed a ornately-carved chair under the handle of the door—these bathrooms were ridiculously large and as well-furnished as a sitting room—and then joined Astrid at the sinks. It felt nothing short of sacred to see Astrid patting at her face with damp paper towels, taking all the makeup away, leaving her looking a little pink and young and clear-eyed. 

“You’re staring,” Astrid said, but she said it fondly. 

“Anyone would,” said Rachel. They both looked at Astrid in the mirror for a moment, at the creamy delicacy of her face, like the inside of a seashell. Something about it made Rachel feel raw and protective. She stepped closer.

“We’ll be late for the reception if we don’t hurry,” said Astrid, looking down at the small collection of cosmetics she had taken from her purse. She still smelled like jasmine.

“Nobody will notice,” said Rachel. It wasn’t a come-on, either, she just hated that downward flick of Astrid’s eyes when she got close.

“Everybody will notice.” Astrid began applying foundation to her face, and after a few seconds of watching Astrid’s face becoming somehow flatter under that brush, Rachel went and got herself a wad of paper towels so she could wash off, too. She hadn’t brought any makeup for herself, but when her face was clean and dry, Astrid pushed the foundation and brush over to her on the counter, and started in on her own blush.

After everything that had happened that day, all the drama and the tears, somehow that wordless gesture could still make Rachel ache so fiercely she felt it in her chest. They were putting on makeup side by side, each at a sink, in a bathroom; when they left the room they would face the outside world with much the same face and on the same side. She wanted to do this again. Hear Astrid humming tunelessly under her breath, assure her that her eyeliner was symmetrical, and then, at the very end, sit up on the countertop while Astrid did her eyeliner, Astrid’s eyes fixed intently on hers, Astrid’s cool, steady fingertips very gently angling her face left or right. When Astrid was done, she mimed kissing her fingertips and pressed them to Rachel’s cheek, very lightly, so she wouldn’t leave a stain of lipstick behind.

“Are we ready to go now?” Astrid said.

Rachel’s cheek still tingled. “Yes,” she lied.

The submarine skimmed just under the surface of the water, and Rachel kept her chin tilted up so she could watch the play of the moonlight on the waves from underneath them, silvery-white and delicate as lace. If she could go anywhere without anybody else knowing where she was? If she could be with anybody? Some small part of her mind wandered off, thinking about how a person could model wave-patterns in code, but by the time the submarine broke through the water and scuttled, like a glass crab, onto the beach, Rachel knew what was coming. When she looked up the pale swathe of sand to the bungalow beyond, where a single lamp burned gold, she was not at all surprised to see Astrid sitting there, on the front step.

From the pilot’s seat, or captain’s seat, or whatever the hell you called it when a man was steering a glass ball of death under the water, Nick said, “I called in sick for you. You got food poisoning at the wedding. But you can always recover unexpectedly quickly, if you want. All you’ve gotta do is radio me.”

“Radio?” said Rachel.

“There’s no phone signal out here.”

“Talk about paradise.” She looked over at him. “I’m guessing Colin and Araminta aren’t far off?” 

Nick gave her an unrepentant smile. “There’s a lot of fuel in this sub,” he said. “I’ll pick you up whenever you like, okay?”

“You could just leave me here permanently,” said Rachel.

“Is that what you want?”

Rachel probed at the thought, gingerly, like it was a sore tooth, and found to her surprise that it didn’t hurt her, didn’t alarm her. The pull of it was as intense as always, but she’d lived so long that she knew herself, and the cramped little office at NYU, the emails from students trying to schedule appointments piling up in her inbox, the plumber’s bill, the questions her mother had about buying a new house—none of it felt heavy, but none of it felt unreal, either. She wasn’t about to discard herself. “Two days,” she said. “That’s about as long as we can play hooky, don’t you think?”

“Two days it is.” 

The shining transparent panel of a door swung up, and Rachel stepped through it onto wet sand. Her high heels sank into it, so she took them off and stood there barefoot. The cold, wet, gritty texture against her skin came as a surprise, because it was real, because it didn’t feel like it was painted with silver and gold or seen through a mist. This was in fact happening.

"Is this happily ever after, then?" Rachel said, trying to make it sound funny.

Nick looked at her evenly. "You know, Rach, I think we've gotten too old for cynicism.”

“Yeah?” She tried not to sound too hopeful.

“I'm not as scared as I used to be," Nick said, so simply and so sincerely that Rachel felt a sudden swell of affection.

“You hopeless gay romantic,” she said, like they were in their twenties again and calling each other gay every fifth sentence just because they could, instead of saying _I love you_. And then, because it really had more than a decade, she said, “I love you.”

“Love you.”

The transparent panel closed again. The submarine disappeared into the water with a burble. 

It was a long walk up that silver beach, like walking through an old black and white movie, the cold crust of wet sand on Rachel’s feet reminding her that it was real, the sea breeze picking up and curling at the nape of her neck, and Astrid, the whole time, staring. In sea-filled silence, her hair down, her wrists resting on her knees, a wispy white robe inviting childish comparisons to an angel, back straight as a queen, and with an immense sense of patience and timelessness, Astrid watched and waited. 

The walk was so long that by the end of it, Rachel was forcing herself not to look away. She couldn’t remember if she had ever looked someone in the eyes for so long without saying anything for as long as this, and it felt unbearable, but she didn’t want to be the first one to break it off, and not because they were playing chicken, either. Not because she had something to prove. Because by the time she stood in front of Astrid, skin all goosebumps from the wind, she was thrumming from that stare, they both were, like they were vibrating at the same frequency, and it seemed natural for her to lean down and kiss her. Like two magnets snapping together. 

Rachel had never kissed Astrid like this before, bending down. She had always been the shorter. But there was something in it, the way Astrid tilted her face up to meet Rachel, hungrily, the way her hands on the backs of Rachel’s thighs drew her closer, and closer, and then one of Astrid’s hands slid down and tugged gently behind Rachel’s knee so that Rachel found herself in Astrid’s lap. Astrid took her time, and Rachel was surprised to find that Astrid languorous yet insistent was every bit as scorching as Astrid fierce and desperate had once been. She smelled faintly of sandalwood and every part of her was soft—soft cinnamon-gloss lips, soft hair, soft silk robe. 

A long time later, Rachel said, “I don’t have to go back just yet.”

Under the gold light of the lamp, Astrid was not quite in a black-and-white movie—there was more color than that—but she was not in full color either. She should have been in a museum, except that you couldn’t pin that beauty down on something as lifeless as marble.

“How much time?” she said.

“I’ve got two days,” said Rachel.

Astrid smiled. “I’ve got the rest of my life,” she said. She was the only woman who could say such a thing to Rachel with the thorns plucked out of it. 

Rachel kissed her again. ****

Bursting out of the secluded greenery and into the riot of the wedding reception, there was only one person Rachel wanted to see. She zigzagged through the crowd, barely avoiding getting hit in the head by a flying chunk of cake—Araminta and Colin were laughing hysterically, icing on their faces—and then, somewhere by the bar, craning her neck desperately, she felt a hand on her arm.

“Rachel, this is Charlie Wu,” Astrid said. Preoccupied as Rachel was, she still noticed the way that Astrid grabbed her arm and then clasped it as she presented Rachel, like they were a couple at a potluck.

Even if Rachel hadn’t heard a short but effective summation of the Charlie Wu Debacle, told by Astrid at 1am the better part of a bottle of Merlot helping her along, she could have got the gist of it in seconds. Legend had it that the two of them had ended somewhere outside a Wendy’s in London, of all places, and that it had involved shouting and a thrown Frostie. The complete lack of dignity in it was what had stuck with Rachel, knowing Astrid as she did. Looking at Charlie now, what red-blooded lesbian wouldn’t understand instantaneously? With perfectly tailored navy slacks, a crisp white shirt half-unbuttoned, and a conspicuous lack of bra, Charlie stood there with her hands in her pockets and quite clearly knew what she looked like. When she smiled, there was a glint of an unexpected gold tooth, a tiny imperfection that somehow made the entire look.

Any other day of the week Rachel would have been intimidated; today she just beamed, flush with success, borderline giddy.

“Charlie Wu of the Beijing Bubble Wrap Wus?” she said, fighting not to laugh. She could sense Astrid didn’t quite understand her, but Astrid was curious, all the more curious because Astrid didn’t yet know the source of Rachel’s fabulous mood. And that helped, too, the fact that Astrid was more interested in figuring her out than in Charlie.

Charlie, for her part, was acting a perfect gentleman. “Just plain old Charlie,” she said, and there came a million dollar smile. Scratch that, this was Singapore, billion dollar smile. It really was impossible not to like her, with that charisma. Despite everything, she made Rachel want to be friends.

But there were more important matters on Rachel’s mind. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “Now come on, Astrid, I need consoling. Big breakup I just had. Monumental.” She tugged at Astrid’s arm. 

Charlie raised her glass, and Rachel, in her euphoria (and, to be honest, tipsiness) noticed that her short fingernails were lacquered in a fascinating interlocking pattern of black and gold. 

“You don’t need to worry,” said Astrid. “Charlie’s not a gossip.”

“Charlie?” said Rachel, cocking her head to the side.

“Ma’am?” said Charlie.

“Do me a favor?” 

Charlie was looking between the two of them and looking more and more amused, as though they were all three sharing a terrific private joke. “Anything.”

“Gossip away.”

“Roger that.” Charlie saluted, goodwill mixed with insouciance, and turned on her heels in some strange dance move. If Astrid permitted it, they really _should_ be friends. 

Then it was Astrid’s turn to tug at Rachel’s arm, and finally the two of them began to make their way through the crowd towards the bathroom units. There were about a dozen of them, and when Rachel went inside one, she found that it was fully equipped not only with a lock on the door, a toilet stall, and a sink, but also a huge mirror, a sofa, and a phone charging station. Because, well, of course.

Rachel plopped herself down on the massive sofa and found it every bit as plush as she was hoping it would be. Astrid, for her part, sank gracefully down beside Rachel. With that pale green slip of a dress against the rose-colored cushions, she looked like she should be in a romantic painting. 

“You look happy,” Astrid said. She had a way of imbuing even the simplest words with a wealth of meaning. Underneath the makeup and the posture, the good posture that would always bear her up unless there was disco to take it out of her, Rachel sensed that she was tired, but happy for Rachel too, and for that, Rachel loved her all the more.

“I think I just lost the nomination for Best Beard 2018,” said Rachel. “But other than that, things are hunky-dory as hell.” 

“Tell me all about it.” Astrid looked like a cat getting comfortable as she rearranged herself on the sofa, and for a moment, Rachel’s mind cut out as Astrid’s knee pressed into her leg, the two of them getting comfortable. But then the excitement took over again, and the told the full story. 

Rachel and Nick had been summoned, as if to a royal audience, so that Nick’s mother and Ah Ma could upbraid her for her selfishness, her ambition, in trying to trap the golden boy. This much she had expected. It might have even been amusing, except that what Rachel hadn’t expected was to hear a version of her own family history mangled beyond all recognition. None of it was a surprise to her. None of it, thanks to armagnac drunk too recklessly after a breakup at Nick’s twenty-seventh birthday, was a surprise to Nick, either. But there was something shocking, still, to hear her mother, the person she knew best in all the world, sneered at for cheating on her father as though she was only a player in a soap opera. To hear her father described as a wronged man made the wedding-cake aftertaste curdle in her mouth. 

For so long, Rachel had been afraid of her mother, and as hard as she worked, as many side jobs as she could pick up, tutor and line cook and bookkeeper and tour guide, she had never felt truly safe. Deep down, she knew that even if she had a million dollars in her savings account, it would make no difference if her mother pushed her away; it would make the logistics easier, and that was all. The shock came when she found out her mother had been afraid of her, too. Or afraid for her. There is a natural inclination to always fight the last war, and so Rachel’s mother had thought she was keeping her relationship a secret because she had a boyfriend as bad to her as Rachel’s father had been to her mother. It was like someone had flipped the lights on in their house, and suddenly the vague outlines of furniture jumped into vivid color. Why her mother always double-checked the locks on the doors before they went to bed. Why her mother never let her be in photographs for her Girl Scout troop. Why her mother always introduced herself as Kerry, even to Chinese people. It wasn’t something Rachel could possibly explain, though she had tried and Nick had been sympathetic. But Eleanor didn’t need to know the nuances to know she shouldn’t, she _really_ shouldn’t, stand there with her mouth primmed up calling Rachel’s mother a slut in her own way. She looked ugly, suddenly. Rachel wanted to— 

“Poirot,” said Nick. Just dropped it into the torrent of words pouring from his mother, and then put his hands in his pockets, expression mild. When he looked at Rachel, her rage vanished. Eleanor suddenly seemed about two inches tall. What did she matter? It was an inside joke between the two of them that a certain department head at NYU liked to lay out drama like he was Hercule Poirot, but that was no penetrating insight. It was a reminder, though, that there was Nick, there was her mother, there was, yes, her savings account, there was the life she had made for herself, and Eleanor could take none of it from her. Nobody could take any of it from her. 

Rachel pressed her lips together, hard, so the grin wouldn’t break out, and met Nick’s eyes, and then she broke up with him. Like tennis, the back and forth immediate, he took it theatrically. He was always going to go back to Singapore. She was always going to go back to New York City. They might as well shock his mother a little...

“I wish I had that,” said Astrid, and Rachel was startled to see that she had been so caught up in the giddiness of her own story, she had missed an expression of wistfulness growing on Astrid’s face.

“I wish I had what you have,” Astrid said. “With your mother, with Nick. Something that can’t be taken away.” She looked as tired as she was beautiful, and she spoke these words like they were final, like she was talking about an extinct species. Rachel took her hand. 

“You do,” she said.

“I’m not just a coward, you know,” said Astrid, and she was either more drunk than Rachel had thought or more hurt than Rachel had thought, or both, the way she said it. _I_ never _thought of you as a coward,_ Rachel would have said, fiercely, but Astrid went on without giving her a chance. “It’s Cassian I’m thinking of. All the time. He’s my son as long as I’m good. As long as I’m good. If I’m Princess Diana, that’s the custody battle won. But…” She struggled for a while, either to find the right words, or to say them out loud. Her dark eyes were expressive.

Finally, Rachel said, “I know,” although she didn’t, not really. She had worked long and hard, fish guts and all, to make sure she never knew what it was like to be turned out of her own home. And it was worse for Astrid, wasn’t it, that she’d made her home such a small, curious-eyed boy, fragile like all children were fragile. Terrifying. Something she knew nothing about. 

“But you do have it with me,” she said. “Something that can’t be taken away. Whatever happens.”

“Really?”

“I have your back. We don’t have to be together; if you need me, you call. We don’t have to—have sex,” she finished, knowing it was a lame note to end her earnestness on, still not quite able to call it what it was, which was only, say, 15% sex. She chewed her bottom lip while Astrid thought about it. Bad habit, popping back up again. When she looked over, Astrid had on a look of fondness tinged, unexpectedly, with a little amusement.

“Though you’d prefer it if we did?” said Astrid, archly.

There was no point in hiding it. “I would,” Rachel said, and laughed because she couldn’t help it. She thought that was all this would be, then, the both of them laughing, her offer floating away, dismissed as gently as could be, but then there was something in the way Astrid’s hand tightened around hers. When they finished laughing, there might be something else.

But before they had finished laughing, the door flew open and a Celeste, or maybe a Selina—one of Nick’s cousins, extremely tall but otherwise unremarkable—all but flew at Rachel in a cloud of cloyingly floral perfume, deep concern over the breakup, and an unmistakable lust for gossip fare.

To Rachel’s surprise, Astrid did not let go. ****

The definite end of two days should have felt restrictive, threatening, but it didn't. If anything, Rachel had never felt more free. Free to wake up and nose into Astrid's glossy hair, watching the sunrise through the window bursting out over the endless water, all cinematic glory to the subtle soundtrack of Astrid's breaths. Free to admire the long pale column of Astrid's throat, and think about nothing more than what they might eat in this shuttered holiday house. Free to talk to nobody, work on nothing, just wait for Astrid's eyes to open and see what happened next, while her outflung arm went numb under the weight of Astrid's body.

What happened next was at once not at all surprising and a tremendous delight. When Astrid saw who was next to her, she hummed contentedly, looking every inch an angel with the morning rays slanting over her face, and then tangled her fingers in Rachel's hair, dragged her in, and kissed her open-mouthed and so filthy it left absolutely no question as to what she'd been dreaming about. It turned out, when there was nobody around to hear for miles and miles of water, Astrid got _loud._

After Astrid came the second time, they slowed down, and after a while it was mostly just the two of them in silence, Astrid resting with her back to Rachel's front, Rachel's thighs a cradle, Rachel's arm slung casually possessive across Astrid so her fingertips clung onto Astrid's shoulder, and a curious absence of any need to do anything; to move, to think. They weren't even waiting. When they eventually got hungry, Rachel scavenged a jar of peanut butter and a package of dried mangoes from the huge, scary, stainless-steel-filled kitchen, and something about that seemed more real than anything else that had happened that morning. It made her talk. It made her able to talk.

"I saw a huge bag of rice in there," she said, passing the peanut butter spoon. "I could catch us some fish tonight for dinner and grill it."

"I was going to call in a helicopter drop of food," said Astrid, as if that was a totally normal thing to say (and to be fair, for her it probably was) and then, oh god, _dimpled_ when she added, "But it's cuter for you to go get it for us. Like we're living off the land."

"We could," said Rachel. "If Nick's snowglobe of doom not-so-mysteriously sinks because nothing that tiny should be under the weight of the ocean, you and I could stay here for years, no trouble. I mean, we'd have to work out a proper water filtration system. But other than that, we're golden."

"What, like you'd take care of me?" said Astrid, a hint of a smile in it, but Rachel had her number by then. A hint of a smile, nothing malicious, just a hint of a smile—that was Astrid's way of offering a way out. But as always, Rachel didn't want to take it. With her free hand, she brushed aside Astrid's hair and dropped a kiss on her exposed neck.

"Yeah," she said. "I would." Was it better or worse that she couldn't see Astrid's face, and Astrid couldn't see hers? "But you gotta know when to fold."

"You think we don't have a winning hand?"

"I think," said Rachel, carefully, "this is paradise for two days only because it's for two days."

Astrid shifted on the bed, twisting a little, so she could see Rachel's face. "Do you wish it could be two years?"

"You mean, do I wish we were completely different people? Do I wish we were Romeo and Juliet with a fixed-up ending? Do I wish we would just cut it all loose and ride off on a white horse somewhere?"

"Something like that," said Astrid. "That sounds very American."

"Yeah, it is," said Rachel, "but if you could do that, you wouldn't be you. I mean, you'd still be the most kind, gracious, jaw-droppingly _hot_ —"

"Thank you," murmured Astrid, half-wry and still enjoying it, and yeah, Rachel had done that on purpose, would never get tired of it, the way Astrid didn't care about compliments unless they came from _her_.

"—woman I had ever met in my life, not to mention intimidating, but you wouldn't be loyal, like I know you. You wouldn't be—I don't know how to say this without sounding like an asshole, but I don't know how you ended up being the least insanely rich girl while being the crème de la crème of insanely rich girls at _exact same time._ You shouldn't have turned out like this, the way you grew up—you should've turned out just as untethered from reality as everyone else at that wedding. But there's something about you that's so unchangeable, so—human."

"So stubborn?"

"Yeah, well, I couldn't love any woman who wasn't stubborn, so that's a given," said Rachel. "What I'm trying to say is—I'm not sorry that you are who you are, not one bit. If I could change one thing about you, I just fucking wouldn't."

"Does that mean two days is a precise limit?" said Astrid. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears.

"No," said Rachel. "Everything is on the table. You can have whatever you want. My house, my name—all of it or none of it. But I just want you to know, if you think for one second that I'm somehow disappointed in you for not being willing to leave your whole life behind for me—I just—that'd scare me silly, because I'm not willing to leave my whole life behind, either. I built it. It's not the same as giving birth, but—it was hard."

"I know," Astrid said, and in one sense she didn't, hadn't lived Rachel's life, hadn't been there for the worst of it, but in another sense, a truer sense, she was one of the very few people on the face of the earth who could know, one of the very few people who Rachel could ever let glimpse it. And so.

"It's all on the table," Rachel said. "I've got a spare room and I'm pretty sure you have a few spare houses, with a private jet too. I don't mind keeping quiet, until you get custody or even after that, if you want. I don't need this to be about other people. I just want to see you as much as I can. When I can."

"Me too," said Astrid, and she was crying in earnest now.

That night, Rachel built a fire for them on the beach, spread out towels, and they had a picnic of sorts out under the stars, talking about everything and anything that came into their heads—dream projects, past anxiety attacks, present persistently annoying colleagues, what books were decent and what newfangled economic theories were trash. And when, finally, they both ran out of things to say and lay there with a stunning night sky above them, thick with stars above in a way Rachel had never seen with city lights to interfere, she finally probed, gently, at the thought of two days again, one day, like a kid with a loose tooth. And found it wasn't true. It really wasn't only one day left with Astrid. Somehow, though they'd made no plans, she was sure of it.

She went to sleep a happy woman.

There were so few constants. There was dancing. It was eight-thirty in the morning in Singapore and the air was still sweetened by the smell of the baos they got for breakfast; it was somewhere around dinnertime and Nick and Rachel’s old apartment was full of boxes they just filled; it was early afternoon on a tiny island and a tropical storm was gathering on the blue horizon; it was past midnight and one or both were up late, beginning to be cross but too stubborn to quit while there’s work undone; it was Colin and Araminta’s wedding night and they were sliding down the knife’s edge between exhaustion and ecstasy. The gilt flaked off of Astrid, the callouses on Rachel softened, and one of the chords in the song happened to hit at the right moment. Astrid stumbled and Rachel caught her by the waist, or Rachel almost elbowed Astrid in the flail of limbs, and they’re grinning wide enough to show all their teeth. Flick of black hair getting in the way, breathless laughter bubbling up. Graceful or graceless, empty room or full dancefloor, it didn’t matter. The music was C-pop, or a waltz, or indie rock, but really, deep down where it counts, it was all disco.


End file.
